On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 05:37:05PM -0700, Rick Kelly wrote:
  | Luke Mewburn said:
  | 
  | >AFAICT, NetBSD/alpha was only used to get the OnTAP alpha port going.
  | >It's still cool to see NetBSD mentioned in NetApp's OnTAP documentation,
  | >even though they don't use Alpha CPUs any more.
  | 
  | I guess they don't have much choice there since HPAQ is throwing away the
  | good for the bad.

NetApp migrated away from the Alpha back to x86 over three years ago...


  | Years ago I was talking to the guy who is now one of the NetApp sales vice
  | presidents. At the time he explained to me that they had no expectation of
  | going beyond the P100 as it could easily saturate the system bus of the
  | commodity EISA motherboards they were using back then.

Well, they had P90's with PCI subsystems (I had a couple of F330's in
a previous job).  Then they went to EV5 Alphas, and the second
generation of those - F7x00 boxen - was pretty good  (I think I had
the first F7xx in Asia/Pacific).  The first generation of "back to x86"
boxen (F8xx) was much much faster than expected.

In any case, I don't feel this is the appropriate forum to get into another
"bash x86 for the sake of it, Alpha is god, why did they drop it" discussion.
Enough of those have occurred already, and /. has a perennial one going as
well...